Looking for an alternative to the Western Digital MyBook Pro Edition II

4/23/2007 9:15:12 AM #

Steve,

thanks for the link. My site was offline for an hour or so yesterday morning (Irish time), apologies for that.

It is back up now so the link should be good.

Cheers,

Tom.

Tom Raftery

4/23/2007 5:40:17 PM #

That's too bad it didn't work out for you.  I've only had good luck with mine but then again I don't have the Pro Edition II, just basic black 500GB My Book Essentials.  I don't really need the Firewire support because at least on my machine USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire.

Glad at least that nothing but the unit itself caught on fire!

Shawn Oster

4/23/2007 6:21:13 PM #

Tom,
  Thanks for the comment!

Shawn,
  I too am glad it didn't "escalate". I'm really pretty bummed and I was even thinking I'd pick up another one and buy a Firewire 800 card for my PC but not after the comments from the guy at the return counter.

Steve Trefethen

4/23/2007 8:45:25 PM #

www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969

Rossen Assenov

4/24/2007 3:37:49 PM #

A couple of years ago, I had the experience of losing, over a period of about 8 months, all four of the 120GB WD Caviar drives I owned. All four died sudden deaths, the most painful of them being one that insisted on endlessly seeking and homing.

In a conversation with a data recovery service, I learned that WD drives have a design failing that allows the head actuator to move the heads too far, to the point that they encounter some rapidly rotating hardware near the spindle. The head carriers, being extremely light metal, do not survive contact well, and the heads often wind up coming into contact with the media. Since the heads will no longer read, the drive controller attempts endlessly to seek and recalibrate, dragging the heads back and forth over the media, and no doubt, plowing furrows.

It was a short time after that experience, and the tremendously wasteful experience of rebuilding systems and recovering (most of) my data from other media, that Seagate announced their 5 year warranty. I switched, and have had no reason to reconsider.

Bill Meyer

9/10/2008 1:50:16 PM #

I have had my WD 1 terrabyte external 6 months now with no problems.  I have 3 250 gig WDs and they too are working fine - some are over a year old.

I am concerned though by what you are saying and thinking of getting another large capacity drive of another brand - to back up to.  I've had a LOT of trouble with maxtors - and with seagate buying them - I imagine their quality will go down as well.

Any suggestions.   majorhart@sbcglobal.net

John Hansen

9/11/2008 2:33:40 PM #

John,
  Thanks for the comment. My recommendation would be to investigate using JungleDisk with an Amazon S3 account at least that's what I'm now doing. It costs me ~$10/month for 66GB of storage right now but it's available everywhere I am and most importantly not sitting here in my house where it's at potential fire risk etc.

I've started a blog post about the above which I hope to post fairly soon so stay tune...

Steve Trefethen